Pledgers got access to beta yesterday. I played with it for about an hour so far (only single player skirmish at the moment) and I must say it is really good! A lot of stuff is missing or rough as expected for an early beta but the core seems very solid.

This looks fantastic. I hope there's a solid 1-player version as I'm totally over multiplayer games once again.

I started playing Friday night and got 15? matches in? There is still some distance to go for the AI on basic tactics such as don't outrun your support and don't turn your back on the fire team in order to chase that light Mech. I played it full screen, windowed, and streamed to the living room via Big Picture / Steamlink. By and large all the pieces of the game work, it runs heavy on memory but doesn't leak, handles sleep and hibernation mid-match, handles alt-tab, etc. There are control issues to work out, but the program is in better shape than many releases.

Stability/knockdown feels out of balance, as do many of the pilot abilities. Right now gunnery and piloting are irrelevant next to Sensor Lock, Precision Strike, and the Evasive Move ability - we'll see if things get better or worse from here out. The maps, while pretty, do too much in too small a space. The Camera is also too close, most combat takes place right at minimum range for LRMs so there isn't a lot of pre-skirmish maneuver and can't be a lot of larger scale scouting and indirect fire support (when they expand past 4v4, if they don't also adjust the live maps and camera height). Map-pan is slow when you move the mouse to the window edge, but WASD is fine - along with QE for rotation. Keyboard navigation is often faster and more reliable than the mouse. It took 1-2 hours to get comfortable with the controls, that's 2-4 matches depending on how distracted you get. Typical focus session is 30 minutes for 15 rounds of combat from launch to victory screen. They have the pieces in place to do a post-encounter salvage appraisal so high hopes for an eventual fleshed out single player experience.

So, it is easy to play the shit out of this now and I'm looking forward to the full release.

Unfortunately a lot of little things have been axed from launch and will be added later. The game is good regardless (backed it, played it, still playing it), but this is another product that will be so much better if picked up one year after launch.

Yeeaahhhh.. One of the big problems I already had with most of the computer games modeling Battlemechs is that they almost all make them bouncy. One of the justifications for having legs is to keep your piloting and aiming platform rock steady. Do the game designers all just forget that there is supposed to be a human riding in these things? The amount of bounce commonly shown would jellify even the hardiest Mechwarrior in minutes.

Now it's worse, as I see an Atlas violently snapping back and forward while firing an arm weapon.

It is lovely, but clearly only for Battletech nerds. All the negative reviews on Steam are about it being "too slow" and "not like MechCommander". Jeesus, go away you idiot.

Anyway, I liked the XCOM like dynamic cameras at first, but now that I deactivated all of them I like the game even more. I feel like I have much more control over the battlefield and a better grasp of what is going on.

This is how I completed my second mission. I guess I'll have to start over. Damn, I suck. (Full disclosure: I started the mission last night but played it this morning. Completely forgot about the turret generator and got pummeled by LRMs for half an hour before I realized that the mission objective was there on the left corner of my screen the whole time. Dumb times.)

Only had time to get a little into the second mission last night, but one of my guys got nailed in the hand from some artillery half-way across the map and it looked like I was going to end the mission with the same results as Falconeer. Going to have to rethink things this evening.

Having never played Battletech and only a single very old (SNES?) Mechwarrior game, what genre of game is this? Is it a top-down turn-based strategy kind of game, like XCOM or the new Shadowrun, where I control a squad of mechs? Or is a third (first?) person action game in which I drive a single mech?

And yes, ammo explosion. Anyway, I redid that missin and I was all clean and unscathed until the very last tank which, just seconds before being stomped to death by my Shadow Hawk, fired a desperation volley against my Spider, hit it in the face and killed the pilot. What the fuck, RNG?

I love this game so much. Itís the Battletech game Iíve been waiting 25 years for. I lost the first mission like 4 times, once due to a death from above right out of the first move by the spider that cored my light mech. It made me cackle, and glad Iíd just saved. My second mission ended about the same as Falcs but Iím rolling with it. My Blackjack got cored by a lucky shot from a tank and my main character is hospitalized for 4 months. I canít afford to repair the Blackjack. This is proving to be an excellent poverty simulator.

This reminds me of the BTech local campaign I played in with other nerds in college where I lost every pretty much every game but since I used dirt cheap mechs and crap equipment I technically made Cbills. You are not the Grey Death Legion guys! :D

Now that I finally got to do some contracts, the first tier of them are significantly easier than the opening story missions. You can recover from a bad start, in case anyone who hasnít bought this yet is turned off by the horror stories. I got my Blackjack fixed, main character is still in traction though.